A sea plow towed behind a ship is used to lay undersea fiber-optic cables.Photo by Alcatel-Lucent

The Sea-Me-We 5 consortium, a group of 15 telecommunications companies, has awarded Alcatel-Lucent and NEC a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to lay an undersea cable that will bring a high-speed network link between Europe and Singapore and points in between.

The South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (Sea-Me-We) consortium is funding the 20,000-kilometer (12,400 miles) cable, the fifth such project for the consortium. This one will bring a 100-gigabit-per-second link, Alcatel-Lucent said Friday.

Alcatel-Lucent will lay the western stretch from Europe to Sri Lanka, with spurs leading to Sicily, Pakistan, India, and various Middle Eastern countries. NEC will handle an eastern segment from there to Singapore, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia, the company said.

Undersea cables are expensive, but they open up international network bottlenecks and make it easier to route around problems such as an earlier cable being severed.

Alcatel-Lucent lays cable using a "sea plow" towed behind a ship that can lay cable at depths up to 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet). They can lay cable at a rate of 5 to 35 kilometers per day (3 to 22 miles).